by Lydia Netzer
“The tortoise. Patience. A long plan,” she said.
“Nine months long,” muttered Sally.
“I think,” said Bernice, “that you are going to have a son.”
“You said that already,” said Sally.
Bernice frowned. She saw a very distinct shape in the tea, one she was not familiar with.
“Look at this,” she told Sally.
“What?” Sally demanded. She sat upright in her chair.
“Look here. Looks like…”
“Looks like a barbell,” said Sally. “There is a barbell right there. What does that mean? I’ve never seen that symbol before.”
“I don’t know,” said Bernice. “Have to get the book out.”
She crossed to the bookshelf and put her finger down the spines of several books, then pulled out a slim one and opened it up.
Sally covered the teacup with her hand, coughed.
Bernice read the words next to the symbol that matched the one in the teacup. The book said, “Broken soul. Danger. Death.”
Sally read her face, snatched the book away, and glared at the entry for barbell.
“Are you serious? What a shitty, shitty thing to say.”
“Wait,” Bernice told her, picking up the mug again. “Is that a rainbow, though? Maybe it looks like a rainbow.”
“It’s a fucking barbell,” said Sally. “Broken soul. What the fuck does that even mean.”
Bernice shrugged and sat down on the coffee table again. She felt sad and sorry. She felt that Sally should not have to survive this pregnancy alone, not have to survive being married to Dean alone. What if the baby did have a broken soul? What if Sally got sick every day, had to be helped to the bathroom, helped back to bed?
“Maybe we can save him, though, don’t worry,” said Bernice.
“What breaks a soul?” Sally said.
“Love,” said Bernice. “Gambling?”
“Love can literally kill him? Like with literal death? The book says death.”
“Maybe that’s metaphor,” said Bernice softly. “They’re only tea leaves.”
Sally lay back in her chair, and ground her teeth together. The tears came out the corner of her eyes and dropped into her hair, her ears.
“What can I do,” Sally said, enunciating each word very clearly. “What steps must I take to fix this? How can I help this boy?”
She sat up and glared at Bernice, as if her body was on fire, and she couldn’t stand it. Bernice looked in Sally’s face and saw a raw edge there that she had not seen before. And her heart was pounding, so full of love. It was just a clump of tea in a porcelain mug. But look at the spirit. Look at the flesh.
“How can we help?” Bernice corrected her. “I’ll help you. I will.”
14
“Here we are. Frankie’s Diner. Diners,” said George, “are the best places to have arguments.”
“No argument,” said Irene. “I’ve been waiting to go to Frankie’s since I crossed the border into Ohio.”
Frankie’s was attached to a nightclub, and George and Irene had waded through a band unloading instruments and amplifiers into the club side on the sidewalk. George took Irene’s elbow, guided her through, but he was nervous to touch her, as if she would evaporate like a smoke golem, disappear into the ether again. When they got into the restaurant they were almost alone. The vinyl seats in the tight booths had been patched with duct tape, but a small brave pink carnation mounted a defense against dinginess in a miniature crystal vase on each table.
“Astronomers don’t normally go here,” said George.
“Good, then we won’t see any of your ex-girlfriends,” said Irene.
“Touché,” George said. He picked up a menu and perused it, but Irene didn’t touch hers.
“I’m eating fish tacos,” said Irene. “Be warned.”
“First date, and you’re having fish tacos. That is bravery. You are an innovator.”
“This isn’t a first date,” Irene corrected him. “I have a boyfriend. You have … some kind of girlfriend, right?”
“Some kind of. Yes. And you have some kind of boyfriend. Wizard is he? Hill troll? Batman?”
“He’s into role-playing games. You know, online ones. He’s made quite a lot of money designing scripts and things for them, thanks.”
“Dungeons and Dragons, that sort of thing?”
Irene said, “Look, I’m here to discuss work. My work and your work.”
“Our work,” said George.
“We don’t have ‘our’ work,” said Irene. “I’m pretty sure we might even cancel each other out.”
George said, “Let’s discuss my work then. Speaking of poems, once upon a time, when I was a little boy, my mother read to me a poem about how the faeries would sometimes come and take little boys away to play with them forever on their island.”
“I know the poem,” said Irene.
“Do you?” said George, incredulous.
“Yeah, it’s Yeats. It’s just … a regular poem. Lots of people know it.”
George felt the Yeats was a cosmic signal, more than a happy accident. “Well, my mother was an astrologer, and she taught me that there were gods in the stars.”
“Lots of people do that, too, and it’s called church.” Irene rearranged the sugar packets in the ceramic container, ordering them pink, yellow, blue. She took the white ones out and made a separate pile.
“Well, I believed it,” said George. “So do you want to put rulers and calculators through all my internal organs?”
“Alright.”
“You have killed me with calculus.”
Irene smiled, looking at him through her eyelashes. He moved his feet carefully under the table, not wanting his long legs to kick her.
“That’s so weird that our mothers were both astrologers,” Irene said, turning the labels of the hot sauce and ketchup bottles forward. “Your mother didn’t really look like an astrologer to me.”
“Yes, well my mother doesn’t do it anymore. She changed.”
“Neither does mine. Maybe we have the same mother.”
“Probably. Because the only thing worse than meeting you when you obviously have already found the love of your life”—George gestured with his arms to indicate Belion’s largeness—“is meeting you and finding out you’re actually my sister.”
An old woman approached the table. She didn’t wear a uniform or carry an order pad, but she asked, “What you guys like to eat?”
“Fish tacos, please. And chili. And Fortuna? Rip the roof off on the peppers, OK? I want to leave here without a lining in my stomach.”
George raised his eyebrows. “Same,” he said.
“Careful,” said Irene. “We used to come here all the time in high school. I know what I’m dealing with. You’ve been sheltered. You’ve been protected from fish tacos and the fire they represent.”
“Well,” said George, “I know they’re messy and spicy and come with beans. You’re breaking all the rules of date food. You care nothing for me. This is proof.”
“When I’m choking, flatulating, and dripping fish from my seared-off lips, you’ll be able to see the beauty of my calculations instead of the asymmetry of my eyes.”
“Probably not,” said George. “I will never forget the asymmetry of your eyes. It is transformative symmetry. It is the best symmetry. It is the symmetry that is beauty.”
*
Outside, it was late. She got into her car and started it. “Come on,” she yelled to him. He got into the car, and as soon as he opened the door, he could hear music. A soaring violin part and a man’s deep voice singing a song from the seventies. This freaked him out. No one else should have known this folk song—the band was so obscure and weird: Compton and Batteau. He had never met anyone before in his life that knew this music.
“How do you know this band?” he asked her.
“My mother again,” said Irene.
“Was she a violinist?” he asked. He wanted to know all
about her. Every year, every hour. What she liked for breakfast, whether she liked her pillows hard or soft. “And what do you like for breakfast?”
“Just get in,” said Irene. “Before we get to breakfast, I want to hear all about your ‘plane of symmetry’ thing.”
“Are you sure?” George asked.
“Sure, but I might have to tell you why it’s not going to work.”
George buckled his seat belt. “Please do. I’ve been waiting for this all day. Without this information, I may stumble through tomorrow thinking I have a future in science.”
“If such a thing were to exist, it would have been found by now.”
“Not true. The more we work with the Toledo Space Telescope, the more we find all kinds of things we didn’t know existed.”
“But what you’re talking about, this axis of the universe, this gateway, it cannot possibly be known, even if it were to exist. Not for thousands of years, maybe. We just don’t have the instruments. We cannot measure this.”
“Who cares what you can measure? If you can think about it, it could be real.”
“It’s not religion, George. It’s measurements. It’s math, whether you like it or not.”
“You know, religion and astronomy and astrology all used to be the same thing,” George reminded her.
“Well, they’re not anymore,” said Irene. She waved her hand around next to George’s head. “Religion, astrology, hokey schmokey over here.” Then she slammed her hand into the steering wheel. “Astronomy, math, rulers over here.”
“My side of the car is more fun,” said George.
“Your side of the car isn’t even a car! Just saying something doesn’t make it real.”
George sat silently. He was watching her hands gripping the wheel. He couldn’t help smiling.
“How can you be like this when you’re working on the Toledo Space Telescope?” she asked. “Astrometry isn’t about guessing, or writing poetry, or whatever.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But the box I was working on is at JPL right now. Undergoing thermal testing. I don’t have to think about it for a few months. I have the semester off thinking about it.”
“Oh, dear, you’ve finished with the TST, and your little side project isn’t going so well either, is it? Maybe I could talk to someone at the institute for you. You’ve only lost your office, your lab space, your assistant, and most of your funding. I’m sure they can find something for you to do, though. Maybe you can come and work for me.”
She flashed him a wicked little smile and his heart contracted. “OK, can you just point the car and drive?” he said.
“Back across the bridge?” said Irene.
“Yeah, downtown. We need to get up very high so I can show you what I need to show you.”
Irene frowned. “High? Are we going to One Seagate?”
“That’s right,” said George. In all the glass spires of Toledo, one lone “skyscraper” dominated the skyline. One Seagate was a thirty-two-story building with an exterior made all of glass. The tallest building in Toledo.
*
George and Irene stood next to each other in a glittering elevator booth, going up. His elbow touching her shoulder, carefully touching it, not pushing it. They were absolutely silent. George watched her pulse beating at her throat, and wondered what she thought of him.
When the door opened at the penthouse, a uniformed security guard at a small podium nodded dispassionately at George and waved them inside.
“Come on,” said George. “This is my mother’s office.”
George took Irene by the elbow and pulled her on past the granite reception desk and down the hallway. The office was beautifully appointed and lit for overnight from dim canisters in the ceiling. The carpet was rich and dense, Dean’s paintings on the wall looking strangely bold for such a conservative office.
“My father’s art,” George tossed to Irene as he swept her on toward the back of the suite, flipping on light switches as he went. She stopped in front of a painting, and he frowned. The last thing he needed was for her to dutifully inspect his father’s work and feel she had to say something horrific like, “They’re nice” or “I don’t get it.”
“My god,” said Irene, staring at the canvas. “I think my mother has one of his paintings hanging in her house.”
“Well, he’s kind of famous,” said George. “But whatever. That’s cool. Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”
They emerged onto the deck, and the city lay before them in lights. The patio was broad, running the length of One Seagate, and there were plants and trees up here, rooted into pots or huge dirt-filled holes in the floor.
“Trees,” said Irene.
“I do her gardening,” said George. “It’s part of why I get paid my exorbitant salary as son.”
Irene went straight to the edge. For a second, George had the terrible impression that she was going to go straight over, and fall to her death. He almost reached out to touch her, grasp her around the waist, pull her back into him, wrap her up tight. But she stood, instead, gripping the railing. When her face turned back to look at him, it was clouded. Her eyes looked wet, as if she were about to cry, or had just stopped herself from crying.
He went over to her and put his hand in the middle of her back.
“Are you afraid of heights?” he said.
“No,” said Irene. She bit her lip. George imagined her biting his lip. He wanted to kiss her, feel her teeth pressing against his mouth, her wide lips on his.
“Did you know,” he said, “that a fear of heights is actually not a fear that you’ll accidentally fall, but that you’ll be possessed by the desire to fall on purpose?”
Irene was silent, then pulled at a vine from a nearby pot and said briskly, “How do you maintain it? I mean, this vine here, it’s got to be some sort of jungle species. Surely it can’t survive out here in the winter?”
“We’ve got walls. Retractable walls. In the winter it becomes a sort of terrarium.”
Irene leaned dangerously far out over the rail, the vines and branches of the trees waving alongside her in the high breeze.
“It’s like the hanging gardens of—”
“Wait,” he interrupted her. “Really, to understand this properly, you have to close your eyes, at this height, and imagine this is still Mesopotamia. This is still Babylon. The sand, the oppression. Forget the space shuttle and satellite telescopes. This is like old. Irrigation is brand new here.”
“Babylon, you say?”
He waved his arms. “The Tigris River. The Euphrates.”
George pointed to the west, to show her where the Toledo Institute of Astronomy lay inside its brick wall, inside its gates.
“There’s the ziggurat at the institute, see it?”
Irene nodded.
“But that one’s just a model,” said George. “You are standing on the site of the ziggurat that Hammurabi built. That Nebuchadnezzar used to climb on a Saturday morning, with his hot cup of tea and bagel sandwich. Prototype for the Tower of Babel. Eighty thousand steps up or something ridiculous like that.”
“Right, something ridiculous,” she said drily.
“And you look down, over the side, Nebuchadnezzar,” he went on, “and there’s the world, spread out below you. Babylon. Toledo. All these sparkling lights from the windows of your citizens, and the roads they use to travel by, and the corners of the world. And you look up, and there are the stars, sparkling and marking out the corners of the sky.”
Irene sighed. “It feels like falling,” she said.
“You know you can point the orbiting telescopes out to count the stars and measure space. But you can also point them in, you know? And sometimes at night the earth looks almost just the same. The stars out there, the people and cities down here.”
Irene laughed. “Somebody told me you believe Toledo is built on the ruins of ancient Babylon, and I thought they were shitting me. Is this all to say that I’m standing on some kind of tomb?”
>
George shook his head. “The ziggurat was not a tomb. It was a temple. So, you’re standing on a kind of altar. A very tall one. This is where it would have been. By the river.”
“Comforting,” she said. “Like blankets and hot tea, but warmer and safer.”
“I’m about to tell you the best part. This is the reason I brought you up here.”
“Oh, good,” said Irene. “I was beginning to think this nutburger you were feeding me about the Tigris and Euphrates was the point.”
“See the Maumee River? That’s the Tigris.”
“Oh, dang, it is the point,” sighed Irene. But she smiled at him, as if it were all OK.
“So where’s the Euphrates?” George pressed on. “Where do you think?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s in Iraq, with the rest of ancient Persia.”
“Nope. It’s here, too. You just can’t see it.”
“Do tell,” said Irene.
“Have you noticed,” George began, feeling like a proud parent on Christmas morning, about to rip the paper off a shiny bicycle, “that lots of people at the institute whisper about what’s ‘downstairs’ and then maybe they point down sort of suggestively like there’s something underground that they’re being very secretive about?”
“No,” said Irene. “I’ve noticed you doing that, but not everyone doing that.”
“Well, there is something underground that we’re being very secretive about, but since I believe you’re about to be asked to be pretty much in charge of it, I think the time has come for you to know it exists.”
“What?” Irene was now interested.
He pointed, and she turned to look west toward where the sun had set, toward the institute. He moved to stand behind her, so that the light breeze blew her ponytail back to brush against his shirt front.
“It starts over there,” he said. “And it comes this way, that way, this way, down to here.” He traced a path with his finger. “And then crosses under the Tigris, and goes back up that way, that way, and up to there.”
“But that’s a circle. You’re telling me this thing is actually following the path of an ancient river?”
“An ellipse actually. But never mind.”